The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who “burned like a comet” in 19th-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox. The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection.

In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art

In Montmartre is a colorful history of the birth of modernist art as it arose from one of the most astonishing collections of artistic talent ever assembled. It begins in October 1900, as a teenage Pablo Picasso, eager for fame and fortune, first makes his way up the hillside of Paris' famous windmill-topped district.

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History

In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.

The Nightingale

Audie Award, Fiction, 2016. From the number-one New York Times bestselling author comes Kristin Hannah’s next novel. It is an epic love story and family drama set at the dawn of World War II. She is the author of twenty-one novels. Her previous novels include Home Front, Night Road, Firefly Lane, Fly Away, and Winter Garden.

Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation

Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. During the occupation, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Paris were left behind, where they would come face-to-face with the German conquerors on a daily basis, as waitresses, shop assistants, or wives and mothers increasingly desperate to find food to feed their families as hunger became part of everyday life.

Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies

We have all seen, whether live, in photographs or on postcards, some of Claude Monet's legendary water lily paintings. They are in museums all over the world and are among the most beloved works of art of the past century. Yet, ironically, these soothing images were created amid terrible personal turmoil and sadness.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

On May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months, its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic.

Commonwealth

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly - thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece

When John Snare, a 19th-century provincial bookseller, traveled to a liquidation auction, he stumbled on a vivid portrait of King Charles I that defied any explanation. The Charles of the painting was young - too young to be king - and yet also too young to be painted by the Flemish painter to which the work was attributed. Snare had found something incredible - but what? His research brought him to Diego Velázquez, whose long-lost portrait of Prince Charles has eluded art experts for generations.

Circling the Sun: A Novel

Brought to Kenya from England as a child and then abandoned by her mother, Beryl is raised by both her father and the native Kipsigis tribe, who share his estate. Her unconventional upbringing transforms Beryl into a bold young woman with a fierce love of all things wild and an inherent understanding of nature's delicate balance. But even the wild child must grow up, and when everything Beryl knows and trusts dissolves, she is catapulted into a string of disastrous relationships.

Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane

In the tradition of John Richardson's Picasso, a commanding new biography of the Italian master's tumultuous life and mysterious death. For four hundred years Caravaggio's (1571-1610) staggering artistic achievements have thrilled viewers, yet his volatile personal trajectory - the murder of Ranuccio Tomasini, the doubt surrounding Caravaggio's sexuality, the chain of events that began with his imprisonment on Malta and ended with his premature death - has long confounded historians.

The Wright Brothers

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story behind the story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly: Wilbur and Orville Wright.

On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright's Wright Flyer became the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard. The Age of Flight had begun. How did they do it? And why?

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos: A Novel

In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain - a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her.

The Underground Railroad (Oprah's Book Club)

The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is 12, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

The Art Detective: Fakes, Frauds, and Finds and the Search for Lost Treasures

What separates a masterpiece from a piece of junk? Thanks to the BBC's Antiques Roadshow and its American spin-off, everyone is searching garage sales and hunting online for hidden gems, wondering whether their attics contain trash or treasures. In The Art Detective, Philip Mould, one of the world's foremost authorities on British portraiture and an irreverent and delightful expert for the Roadshow, serves up his secrets and his best stories.

Go Set a Watchman: A Novel

An historic literary event: the publication of a newly discovered novel, the earliest known work from Harper Lee, the beloved, best-selling author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014.

The Japanese Lover

In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young Alma Belasco's parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There, as the rest of the world goes to war, she encounters Ichimei Fukuda, the quiet and gentle son of the family's Japanese gardener. Unnoticed by those around them, a tender love affair begins to blossom. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the two are cruelly pulled apart.

New York socialite Caroline Ferriday has her hands full with her post at the French consulate and a new love on the horizon. But Caroline's world is forever changed when Hitler's army invades Poland in September 1939 - and then sets its sights on France. An ocean away from Caroline, Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, senses her carefree youth disappearing as she is drawn deeper into her role as courier for the underground resistance movement.

A Man Called Ove

Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon - the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him "the bitter neighbor from hell". But behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness.

The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary - one who was equally ambitious but who possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Daniel James Brown's robust book tells the story of the University of Washington's 1936 eight-oar crew and their epic quest for an Olympic gold medal, a team that transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans. The sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the boys defeated elite rivals first from eastern and British universities and finally the German crew rowing for Adolf Hitler in the Olympic games in Berlin, 1936.

A Great Reckoning: A Novel

When an intricate old map is found stuffed into the walls of the bistro in Three Pines, it at first seems no more than a curiosity. But the closer the villagers look, the stranger it becomes. Given to Armand Gamache as a gift the first day of his new job, the map eventually leads him to shattering secrets. To an old friend and older adversary. It leads the former Chief of Homicide for the Sûreté du Québec to places even he is afraid to go. But must. And there he finds four young cadets in the Sûreté academy, and a dead professor. And, with the body, a copy of the old, odd map.

The Marriage of Opposites

Growing up on idyllic St. Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. Rachel's mother, a pillar of their small refugee community of Jews who escaped the Inquisition, has never forgiven her daughter for being a difficult girl who refuses to live by the rules. Growing up, Rachel's salvation is their maid Adelle's belief in her strengths and her deep, lifelong friendship with Jestine, Adelle's daughter. But Rachel's life is not her own.

Publisher's Summary

"The Lady in Gold", a portrait considered an unforgettable masterpiece, one of the 20th century's most recognizable paintings, made headlines all over the world when Ronald Lauder bought it for $135 million a century after Klimt, the most famous Austrian painter of his time, completed the society portrait.

Anne-Marie O'Connor, writer for the Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling Viennese Jewish society figure; daughter of the head of one of the largest banks in the Hapsburg Empire, head of the Oriental Railway, whose Orient Express went from Berlin to Constantinople; wife of Ferdinand Bauer, sugar-beet baron.

The Bloch-Bauers were art patrons, and Adele herself was considered a rebel of fin de siècle Vienna (she wanted to be educated, a notion considered “degenerate” in a society that believed women being out in the world went against their feminine "nature"). The author describes how Adele inspired the portrait and how Klimt made more than a hundred sketches of her - simple pencil drawings on thin manila paper.

And O'Connor writes of Klimt himself, son of a failed gold engraver, shunned by arts bureaucrats, called an artistic heretic in his time, a genius in ours. She writes of the Nazis confiscating the portrait of Adele from the Bloch-Bauers' grand palais; of the Austrian government putting the painting on display, stripping Adele's Jewish surname from it so that no clues to her identity (nor any hint of her Jewish origins) would be revealed. Nazi officials called the painting, "The Lady in Gold" and proudly exhibited it in Vienna's Baroque Belvedere Palace, consecrated in the 1930s as a Nazi institution.

The author writes of the painting, inspired by the Byzantine mosaics Klimt had studied in Italy, with their exotic symbols and swirls, the subject an idol in a golden shrine. We see how, 60 years after it was stolen by the Nazis, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer became the subject of a decade-long litigation between the Austrian government and the Bloch-Bauer heirs, how and why the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, and how the Court's decision had profound ramifications in the art world.

In this book listeners will find riveting social history; an illuminating and haunting look at turn-of-the-century Vienna; a brilliant portrait of the evolution of a painter; a masterfully told tale of suspense. And at the heart of it, The Lady in Gold - the shimmering painting, and its equally irresistible subject, the fate of each forever intertwined.

Where does The Lady in Gold rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

The best

What did you like best about this story?

It covered so much - the Jewish origins & experience in Vienna, the Viennese artists' involvement in the contemporary art movements of the 20th century, the varied experiences of the different families before, during & even after the Nazi times, & finally the detailed legal issues that brought "The Lady in Gold" portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to the United States.

Which scene was your favorite?

Impossible to single out any one - all so rich in "you are there" details.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

It was wonderful to dwell in for a whole week to not miss a word.

Any additional comments?

Having seen the 5 Klimt paintings at the Neue Galerie when they were first exhibited in New York & knowing some of the background, I found the book very special.

I find stories on art history very appealing. This one is excellent. I recommend this book and plan to listen to it again. At first the person narrating the book put me off. I felt she was cutting her words off. That soon changed and she proved to be the right person to narrate this book. I know my knowledge and appreciation of Gustav Klimt has improved. Also my knowledge of Austrian and German attitudes of this period was eye openning.

It would be bad enough if it were just her uninspired reading of the book - she just races through with no inflection to give life to the story; however, the real failure is her mispronunciation of so many words and names. Didn't it occur to an editor to correct her when, for example, she pronouced "fraulein" as "frow-line" when it's supposed to be "froy-line." Or, even worse, pronouncing the German article "Die" as "dye" rather than "dee." English words get treated badly, too. She apparently has no idea how to correctly say "hegemony." There are, alas, too many other examples to mention.

I would hire a good editor to shape a story and not allow for the off-topic details and the inconsistent presentation of the material (flowery in one area, list of factoids in another, and redundant in spots). The strongest narrative was the last few paragraphs - why wasn't this material rephrased and used at the beginning to draw readers in?

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

Two words: cohesive narrative

How did the narrator detract from the book?

OMG - monotone with an inability to break sections into phrases. Reading aloud is like music, add some dynamics, some change in pitch, use pauses effectively.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

For once, I'm trusting Hollywood will do a better job of presenting the story than the book. (And now I'll go look up who the screenwriter is as s/he will deserve an award of some type if they managed to make an intelligible narrative where this book failed.)

This story was absolutely enlightening! I learned so much about Vienna before both world wars. The descriptions of the families, of different religions and how Hitler's annexation of Austria and why so many Jewish families were tragically trapped and murdered. I thought that the story of Klimt's relationships with the lady in gold and the subjects of other of his paintings was an added bonus. So much info very well researched and presented.

I'm sure the title of the book has more people reading it, but it is ironic that the fact that the model was Adele Block-Bauer was intentionally obscured by history, and is then perpetuated by the title of this book, I enjoyed reading about Klimt and his contemporaries, and the struggles of the Bloch-Bauer relatives who never gave up to uphold their rights. It's a sad story about injustices in the world, set against the amazing artwork of Klimt.

This is a true-life story about the Austrian collusion in Nazi theft of art during WWII, and of its eventual restitution after a heroic battle, some 60+ years later. It is a compelling human drama and an important work. The narrative suffers slightly from distracting side-tales, and the writing is not seamless. I found the reading to be too rushed, as if the reader was trying to get through the story as rapidly as possible.

The narrator's voice is like fingernails on a blackboard to me. At first, I thought there was something wrong with the recording; she reads too quickly and then slows way down. At one point I actually adjusted the speed to see if it would help but it didn't. Also, her over-enunciation is a ridiculous affection. I wasn't sure I was even going to be able to finish to book. I'm very interested in the subject so every day I force myself to focus on the story - not on the narrator but I would have enjoyed it more if I'd just bought the book and read it.

Where does The Lady in Gold rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Up there, definitely.

What did you like best about this story?

This was many stories and introduced new information in an interesting layering and interleaving of private and historical events well. I also learned WWII facts about Austria that is not the usual fare one comes across in the 'proverbial history book' of the holocaust and the Nazi era. The secret life of this family's heirlooms reminded me of The Hare with the Amber Eyes and made me regard my own family's belongings in a different light. Things are so important when they mark our losses.

What does Coleen Marlo bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

No doubt audio book narrators love a great story, and it was evident in this recording. Or maybe that's just the art of narrating--we hear the reader's sustained interest as we discover the story along with them. I suppose in this performance the fact that the narrator did not seem to be reading separate stories and kept the story unified helped connect you to the narrative line, or lines, as there were many different shifts in time and place. Coleen Marlo has a superb range and such a rich voice capable of subtle nuances of tone. I like how she does mens' voices.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Not really.

Any additional comments?

I found that the narrator fleshed out the females in this story so well that you almost felt you were at their tables, salons, in their landscapes and drawing rooms, and court rooms.